Blowing in the wind

I walked to the coast to see how the ponies were faring. It's been very windy for the past couple of days; last night as I lay in bed I felt the old stone house shudder as  gusts hit the north west corner where my bedroom is.

The ponies were grazing in the teeth of the gale where the land slopes steeply down to the sea. One was standing motionless with its rump to the wind but the other 3 or 4 ambled towards me. Blobs of spume were flying up from below and sticking to the grass but they seemed unconcerned. It's difficult to illustrate the wind, only its effects being visible, hence the mane here. I've softened the image slightly and  added  a bit of glow.


Feel free to skip the rest but these ponies have taken me for a  wonderful intellectual canter this evening. On the way home I fell to wondering how the ponies coped with the cold weather  since they have no protection on the open coast. So I googled "How do horses keep warm?" and was soon immersed in a wealth of fascinating information about the evolutionary adaptations that enable them to deal with low temperatures. These include their solid shape: think how much longer a baked potato stays hot  compared to a chip (=human figure),  their furnace-like digestive system (constant munching means constant warmth), thin legs (no heat loss), specialized blood supplies to the extremities that open up if necessary, and a very clever system of seasonal hair growth and loss triggered by day length so that the winter coat starts growing at midsummer until the winter solstice turns it off again. Horses are  animals of northern latitudes and so  have evolved to be comfortable in low temperatures.

My thoughts turned to the ponies that Captain Scott took to the Antarctic for his attempt to reach the South Pole. They were intended as work horses to haul supplies to depots placed along the route. Their fate was eventually to be killed and eaten either by the dogs or the men when their fodder ran out. One of the  main reasons for the failure of Scott's expedition was his reliance on ponies, rather than dogs, but until now I did not know the full story behind this.  Although he sourced the ponies in Manchuria, Northern China, where the winters are very cold,  they did not cope well with the Antarctic ice and snow because their hooves broke through the crust and sank in deep which slowed them up. It's been suggested that if the ponies had worn equine snow shoes (as employed  in Scandinavia and in North America )  they would have made faster progress. Snow shoes were taken but not used because Oates, a cavalry officer who was responsible for the ponies, thought they were too much trouble and  they were left behind on the ship. Estimates indicate that, by using them, the ponies would have operated more efficiently and possibly altered the eventual outcome.

Not only did the ponies shed their winter coats in the long days of the Southern summer but Oates, in charge of the oats and all the rest of the ponies' fodder, may not have provided  sufficiently calorific rations. In particular he may have missed a trick - along with pretty much all of us. It seems that horses are not exclusively vegetarian. That's right, they are known to eat meat! In harsh grassless climes such as Iceland, Norway, Tibet and Bhutan, horses have traditionally been fed on, and enjoyed,  a high protein diet including blood, fat or fish. Shackleton on his first Antarctic expedition used a pony called Socks who ate blubber. This all seems a bit shocking - can it be true?  Well, CuChullaine O'Reilly, an experienced horseman and fellow of the Royal Geographical Society has written a book Deadly Equines which set out to overturn the popular image of the horse as a docile herbivore, starting with the Greek myth about the man-eating horses of Diomedes and going on to discuss carnivorous horses through the ages:
A revolutionary departure from equestrian romance. It is a fact-filled analysis which reveals how humanity has known about meat-eating horses for at least four thousand years, during which time horses have consumed nearly two dozen different types of protein, including human flesh. To check the supposition, a horsey magazine gave its readers a questionnaire and found that considerable numbers of horse owners confirmed that they had seen their beasts not only consuming things meaty but actually killing a variety of small animals...

My evening's trek though equine history means that I won't be looking at all these  pretty horses with quite such innocent eyes in future.